Issue 19 | August 2008

Speeded up, layered, sliced – Sheena Macrae’s work is a compression of iconic film material that confronts and ridicules the mechanism of the entertainment industry. Playing with collective memory, the London-based artist displays a humorous take on how (much) we can perceive.

Content

La Vie de Jesus was Bruno Dumont's debut feature. It is a cold hard and crisp film about aimless youth in Northern France. It follows an epileptic young man – Freddy – as he spends time with his girlfriend, family and friends. Freddy succumbs to a violent rage and creates a situation in which he needs to flee.

I always knew exactly what I wanted to be. People call me an experimental filmmaker – but I knew it was just a label – that meant ‘not commercial’. But I knew that I wasn’t experimenting, that I had these objectives that I set out to achieve...

A critical success at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, Kazuhiro Soda’s Campaign is a strikingly sharp and insightful documentary detailing the structure and influence of Japan’s Liberal Democrat Party (LDP).

In many ways Moolaadé (2003) acts as a digest of Sembène’s career as a whole and affirms his canonisation as the ‘Father of African Film’. The film was intended as the middle part of a trilogy focusing on the lives of women that he had begun with Faat Kiné (2001).

This film may be very difficult for you to watch. Difficult if you do not recognise yourself in any of the characters, and find them ridiculous, baffling or frustrating. Difficult if you do feel an affinity for either or both of the manipulative lovers, and feel tempted into a masochistic reliving of your past foibles.

If the arrival of punk in the mid 1970s is to be regarded as a revolution, as it almost invariably is, at least in cultural terms, then like all revolutions it is reasonable to assume that it came to overthrow something. Some kind of unsatisfactory or moribund state was there to be defeated...